WINTERSLEEP
I was having trouble sleeping. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there and listening to the blizzard when I had the most vivid impression that it was a blizzard in Minneapolis in 1959. And I found this deeply disturbing. I knew it would now have to turn on its lamp, get out of bed, and try to write about me; and of course no matter what it wrote, I would only sound like something it had made up. But in the end it decided to stay put, turn over, and keep me to itself. I think that was the right thing to do. After all, it was only a blizzard in Minneapolis in 1959. How are you supposed to describe something like me? And when you think about it, why should you try, why should you even care?
THE PEYOTE JOURNAL BREAKS OFF
When I am done puking I get up from the floor, wash my face, and slowly resuming and erect stance automatically look in the mirror. Whoa. In the first place, it isn’t a mirror anymore but a window, and on the other side of this window, about ready to poke its head in, stands an enormous white horse, very gaunt, its gaze electric blue, the color of desert sky shining through the eye sockets of a skull. Now we’re apparently going to get sort of Mickey Mouse with bloody teeth. So things do not appear to be headed in an especially auspicious direction, and it is with some discouragement that I exit the bathroom and walk down the hall toward the living room where, after a journey of several years, I switch on the TV with the idea of checking out the action on CNN. It’s not long before I discover that it is possible to weep from sheer astonishment and rage, I never knew that. The stained glass-gold light of the end of September falls through the window, creating the impression of a staircase, a steep and absurdly inviting one. All at once I am vividly aware of what this room is going to look like when I am no longer alive.
TRANSFUSION
Strange, I suffered from none of these symptoms until I was so intensively treated for them. Now I’m always freezing, and have evidently been shattered into five or six chattering replications of myself, all leaning in utter exhaustion on very thin canes made of glass.
I remember the night we were torn like a page from our sleep:
I, your telephone, command you to report to the ER without delay.
The last thing you see is the first.
This time it seems I woke up with pneumonia, anemia, tuberculosis (further tests will be required), crucifixion by toothache, a shadow by night, &c. Clearly I will never be the same. Yet you are with me.
To your entire satisfaction has anyone described the look of love? Mine neither; but I have seen it.
I’m seeing it right now.
I am traveling up the beams of your eyes. I am slowly being lowered into a place of light.
IMAGO
From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one. We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates, April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candle flame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.
NUDE WITH HANDGUN AND ROSARY
The small silver crucified man hangs between her breasts like an arrow directing attention away from the face in its nimbus of unasked-for beauty, all that stands between her and apparition, while pointing the way to the ever inexplicable V, all that’s left of her animal: damp, like the tip of a painter’s brush just dipped in darkest blue. She had put the thing on like a necklace and gone to admire it in the full-length mirror, in muted light the color of gold’s shadow at this late-afternoon hour. There’s a light that enters houses with no other house in sight. How describe it? But then there are more important thins to think about than light. It lies on the dresser blackly glowing, the one object that’s completely self-explanatory here. Just look at you, child with the sun-colored eyes, waiting in line with love’s innumerable patients and their grievances at scarecrowlike standstill, how slowly, how badly, they mend; just one more being tested in need of new double-thick Coke-bottle glasses, straining in the poor light to make out the oversize letters of their own obituaries while they’re waiting to be born… Soon, soon, between one instant and the next, you will be well.
There is a sound that comes from houses with no other house in sight.
DEAD SEAGULL
Seagull in the corn, postage stamp-size cornfield in the woods, in the middle of the state, and how you ever got here. Weather of heaven, July Massachusetts, the blue sky one endless goodbye. Give me a minute, maggot-swarming preview of the future, give me a moment. You can hone a blade until there is no blade, or dwell with magnifying glass so long on a word that finally it darkens, is not, and fire in widening circles consumes the world. For a moment only, stay with me, mystery. Before you change completely into something other, slow cloud, entrance, spell, not yet remembered name, stay; tell me what you mean. A dead bird is not a dead bird I was once told by someone who knows.
SONG
Wisteria rain, where is your child-mother? This must be the last bee on earth. So you find no more grandeur or mystery here? Perhaps you neglected to bring any. Heckling sparrows, vast electron cloud of gnats on windless water. Night blue volume in a language no one reads…Are we tired yet? Are you finished debating the blind who insist that light doesn’t exist, and have proof of it? Nobody’s alone, God is alone. If you liked being born, you’ll love dying.
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发表于 2020-1-11 15:06:00
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